The Blindboy Podcast - The History of The English Working Class with Professor Carl Chinn

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

Carl Chinn is a historian who focuses on the history of Birmigham. We had a tremendous chat Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do a line of Angela's ashes, you glamorous tanyas. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. I'm recording this podcast in a hotel room over in Oslo in Norway. And I'm actually marvelling, I'm marvelling at the sound quality. I've got a shitty microphone, worth about 60 quid, that I travel with. And the room itself is actually quite echoey so I'm very surprised at the lovely warm sound that I'm getting out of this mic in this room. It's certainly not warm in Oslo, it's minus 12 degrees in Oslo. It's a type of cold that penetrates your bones but luckily I am dressed appropriately, head to toe in outdoor gear.

Double Gore-Tex pants that trap a layer of warm air like the plumage of a sparrow. And I have waterproof, snowproof, steel-toed hiking boots, so I'm perfectly equipped for wandering Oslo in minus 12 degrees I'm a 21st century divorced Viking I was really looking forward to going to the Viking ship museum here in Oslo but it's fucking closed it's closed until 2026 while they do renovations and I'm sickened because they've got a perfectly preserved 9th century Viking ship that's 78 feet long. The only one of its kind in the world and I was really looking forward to seeing this but the museum is closed. But the wonder of life is that I have a choice about how I react to that sense of disappointment. I could choose to ruminate on that feeling of disappointment

and tell myself, well, the trip to Oslo is pointless now. I really wanted to see that Viking museum and now I can't. This type of stuff always happens to me. What's the point? I'm just going to stay in my hotel room. Or I could acknowledge the feeling of disappointment,

except that disappointing things are an unavoidable facet of life. Sometimes things don't go as you planned because events are outside of my control. Let's be curious. Let's see what else I can do in Oslo. I'm going to wander around and have a little adventure. I know that might sound very silly there but sometimes a minor

disappointment can really colour the mode of our day, of the rest of our day. If I don't have emotional awareness, I can end up reverting to a kind of childhood position, whereby something disappointing happens and my response is to kind of sulk a little bit, to sulk a little bit. And that thing can trigger a type of all or nothing thinking. The Viking Museum is closed. I was really looking forward to it. Now the trip is pointless. Now I can't have any fun. What's the point? This is so unfair. It can be so easy to slip into that way of thinking. And when I noticed that coming up in me, I challenged it immediately.

I challenged it immediately and says, I've no evidence whatsoever that my trip to Oslo is now going to be shit because the Viking Museum is closed. I've no evidence. I'm feeling disappointment. This isn't nice, but I'm treating this feeling as a fact.

Feeling disappointed because the museum is closed. That's a fact. But allowing that feeling of disappointment to confirm that the rest of the trip is pointless. That's not a fact at all. So as soon as this podcast is finished, I'm going out into Oslo and I'm having fun. And I don't know what's going to happen. I'm just going to approach the city with curiosity and some nice music and to illustrate the importance of acknowledging an emotion like that and challenging it after finding out that the Viking museum was closed and then challenging that feeling and going fuck it I'm going to have crack

anyway I went in to have my shower, but while I was in the shower, some water got into my ear. Now, I mean into my ear canal. Some water got trapped in my ear canal that I couldn't get out, and then I couldn't hear properly in my right ear. It was very unpleasant. You know the feeling. It happens every so often. It's one of the disappointments of life. pleasant. You know the feeling, it happens every so often. It's one of the disappointments of life when you use a shower or go into a swimming pool. Sometimes you get water trapped in your ear and you can't get it out and it's not very nice. So this was the second disappointing thing that happened in my day. Now here's the thing and anyone who flies a lot as part of their job will tell you this. Tomorrow I'm flying to Berlin. You don't want to get on an airplane if there's a bit of fluid caught in your ear. If you have like fluid caught

in your ear from the shower or the swimming pool or if you have a cold even, when you get on a fucking plane and you take off or land, that pressure can actually draw the fluid deep into your ear and then it becomes a problem that can last a couple of weeks or a month. Now I'm not joking, I got onto a plane 10 years ago with a head cold and when that plane took off, my left ear got clogged with mucus for months and I couldn't hear properly and I got multiple ear infections. It really wasn't pleasant. So this morning when I got that water in my ear in the shower, I immediately kind of panicked a little bit. I went, fuck, I've water stuck in my ear. It won't come out. I'm going on a plane tomorrow. Fuck. I know from experience when I get on that

plane tomorrow with the water trapped in my ear the plane is going to make it way worse and this could become a problem for months. This is really disappointing. So what did I do? I responded to the situation calmly, went online, figured out how do I get water out of my ear that's just gone in, found a YouTube video, I lay my head on its side and used the palm of my hand to create a suction motion against my earlobe and that sucked all the water out and the problem was solved before it got worse. Now why is this relevant? Why am I even talking about this? I'll tell you why. Because I had mindfully taken ownership of my feeling of disappointment earlier, it meant that I was in the emotionally regulated position to respond to the water in my

ear in a solution focused way. You see, if my mood was, the Viking Museum is closed, this is awful, this is terrible, my day is fucked. If that was my mood, and I'm ruminating on themes of unfairness, when the water then got trapped in my ear, I would have used that as confirmation for that theme of unfairness.

I'd have just said, there you go, water's stuck in your ear, now you're fucked and you're going to get on that plane tomorrow and you're going to get an ear infection. I would have engaged in what's called emotional reasoning. I'd have been ruminating and feeling that everything was unfair and then scanning for anything that confirms that feeling of unfairness and not challenge it. And I certainly wouldn't have calmly said, there's water in my ear. How disappointing. Let's find a solution. And now I've found a solution. I don't have any water in my ear. I've got my lovely winter clothes and I

can't wait to go out into Oslo and have some fun. And you know what? I might get hit by a car because life is chaos and bad things happen. And I've no control over that. I've no control over what happens to me, but I have full control over how I react to what happens to me. And there's a wonderful freedom. There's a wonderful freedom in that, in acknowledging that. Acknowledging that I can't create certainty. Anxiety is when I try to create certainty. I can't create certainty. Life is uncertainty, but I am certain that I can respond to uncertainty when it presents itself. That's mindfulness. Why the fuck is he talking about Viking museums and water in his ear?

Is this him being autistic again? No, it's just mindfulness. This is mindfulness. To be mindfully aware of my emotions throughout the day. To really be mindfully aware of my emotions. And to catch myself

and to challenge myself when my emotions are reactive rather than proactive and that's mindfulness that's a that's mindful practice and when I'm not being mindful of those tiny little things like that when I'm not being mindful unnecessary suffering just spirals and grows like a ball that's rolling down a hill and gathering dirt until it becomes massive. Mindfulness for me is catching and noticing the little things early and I mean literally early because when you wake up first thing in the morning that's the best opportunity. That's the best opportunity to notice how I'm feeling are my feelings a realistic appraisal of what's actually happening right now

or are they reactive emotions are the reactive emotions that are somehow colored by unhelpful shit I learned growing up and for me what I mean by that is unfairness for me specifically. The feeling of unfairness. Things don't go right. I'm always fucking up. That's a trigger for me because if you grow up neurodivergent in the school system, things can be a little bit unfair sometimes because you're struggling within a system that isn't designed for you. For you, maybe your parents didn't get along so well when you were a kid.

So the feeling of abandonment might be a trigger for you. Or conflict might be a trigger for you. So mindfulness is about being aware of our own personal stories and being aware that we might have written scripts for ourselves based on these stories that are quite unhelpful and we don't have to follow that script we can write a new story because we're adults. So for this week's podcast I've got a wonderful conversation with a historian by the name of Carl Chin from Birmingham. I first met Carl over the summer when I was doing a podcast in Birmingham and Carl was my guest. But we only got to speak on stage for about

20-30 minutes but we immediately hit it off. We sat down and had a pint and we spoke for about eight hours solid about fucking everything and anything to do with history. Carl is one of the most knowledgeable and passionate people I've ever fucking met. He's a professor of history but there's no academic sense of exclusion from him. At the end of the day he's just a person who's deeply curious and passionate and knowledgeable and driven by generosity. Driven by generosity. The generosity of sharing his fucking knowledge

with whoever wants to listen. So I brought Carl back on the podcast when I was in Coventry a few months back for a proper chat. And what I wanted to speak about really was like Carl's area tends to be like what he most gets brought onto the media to speak about is the real history of the Peaky Blinders, the real history of the Peaky Blinders, the working class gangs of Birmingham. But what I wanted to speak to Carl about, because I know very little about it, is the history of the English working class.

I know from comments from my own listeners, because I've quite a large listenership in England, I know from comments from my own listeners that for English people to show interest or to speak about their history, it can make them a bit queasy and unsure. Because, first off, a huge amount of English history is the history of colonisation, the history of the empire. history of the empire and the other thing is a fear that it can come off as nationalistic and adjacent to fascism and Carl Chin is wonderful because he speaks about English history with this in his awareness he speaks about it from a position of inclusivity and understanding and community with all people living in England he's really quite fantastic before I get into the podcast please check out any of Carl's books his name is spelled c-h-i-n-n check out Carl Chin has published a ton of fucking history books so if

you like this podcast go out and buy one of them. I was chatting to Carl about possibly him getting his own podcast together. When he does that, I'll definitely let everybody know I might have him back on again. And I don't do a huge amount of talking myself in this chat because Carl is too fascinating. He's too fascinating. I just sat back and listened and we spoke about a lot of stuff from the history of the English working class to the Anglo-Saxons to the Peaky Blinders. We chat about loads. So here's my conversation with Professor Carl Chin. And before I continue two things. First off for those of you who aren't from fucking Ireland or England, Scotland, Wales,

Carl's accent is, it's a Birmingham accent, which is a wonderfully lyrical accent. It's the accent you hear in Peaky Blinders. And then the second thing is, early on in this podcast, I mention an English tree that was cut down. And I can't think of the name of it. It was the sycamore Gap Tree. It's a little bit of a dodgy Coventry chair. Can you move the mic a little bit close there, Carl? How's that?

Can you hear Carl there? Are you all right? Okay. It's hard to know what to chat to you about because literally everything I talk to you about, you seem to know about it. If I had one kind of intention for tonight and the thing I really want to chat to you about is,

so in Ireland, we learn everything about why Britain is bad. And in England, you don't learn anything about how Britain is bad. You know what I mean? But we also don't learn anything about how Britain is good. And something I'd love to know more about, because when I'm always talking about the Brits, I make it clear to my audience that who I'm speaking about is the elite

and not the normal, regular working people of of england or scotland or wales or whatever and like i want to know about the the english working class i want to know about that history i want to know about and the other thing too and and it it's i can say it as an irish person right because if you say it it's weird for you. But there's so many English people and they're like, I don't know. I'm afraid to be even proud of Englishness because of how dodgy that territory is. Now, me as an Irish person,

I've no problem being proud to be Irish. I'm well able to explore my culture, my history, and it's encouraged and prideful and compassionate and on an international scale as well with solidarity with Palestine and that but I do feel sorry for poor old English people sometimes I feel sorry for I'll tell you what did it for me recently do you not remember that tree that got knocked down yeah the one that got down up in the north. Yeah, and I saw how upset people were online, and I felt sorry that it's like, that's something that you can hold on to,

and that you love, and that there's tradition, and no one's going to say, are you Tommy Robinson's best pal? Do you know what I mean? The similar thing happened in the black country recently, I'm sure many people in the room heard about it the destruction of the crooked house pub of the was it's a tremendous building it was built originally as a farmhouse in the middle of the 1700s just on the cusp of the

industrial revolution and it was transformed eventually into a pub it was officially called the glen arms after the the wealthy family that owned the land nearby but it was transformed eventually into a pub. It was officially called the Glyn Arms after the wealthy family that owned the land nearby. But it was right on the edge of the Earl of Dudley's land. And there's collieries all around. Bagbridge Colliery was a big one nearby. What's a colliery? A mine.

A coal mine. A coal mine. You call it that? Yeah, colliery. Wow. I'd never heard of that. Question for you, where was the only mine, coal mine in Ireland? Tipperary? No. Where? Leitrim, Eregna.

Really? Yeah. We didn't have much coal in Ireland. Not much coal at all, that's why you used the peat instead. Okay. I don't know which is better, they're bought bad. So the crooked house was called the crooked house because of all the work underneath,

all the tunnels that were cut. It went on a slope, but it was the... Has anybody ever been in the crooked house? It was strange, wasn't it? You go in there and you could put a coin one way on the slope and it'd go up instead of going down. It was like defying gravity wasn't it wow and somebody bought it it was a symbol of black country pride which is the region just to the west of birmingham dudley what is called sandwall west bromwich wednesday places like that

warsaw wolverhampton bilston and gotta be careful what I say here because it's still a legal case, but somebody bought it and lo and behold, this ancient building that was symbolised a shift from agriculture to industry and working people's pride ended up being burnt down. They're bulldozed. Oh, God, okay. So there's still an investigation going on. People are raising their eyebrows.

People got really angry about it. There's a huge group of the French. Was it listed or anything? No, it was about to be listed. Okay. And this is one of the problems, I think, that we face within these countries, that they don't now normally do that,

knock buildings down straight away. What they do to an old building that could have a place in the modern world, they let it deteriorate. And once it's deteriorated enough, oh, it's health and safety. We have to knock it down. And we're losing too much of our

edge. So to come back to the point that you made, one of the books I'd like to write in the future, if I ever get a chance, is about working class heroes. Because what's happened is, I think, over the last 30, 40 years, the idea of the working class has been pushed out. You don't hear politicians, you hear phrases like working people,

but you don't hear anybody say working class anymore. And lots of young people, in my opinion, and it's based on my work in lots of schools in working class neighborhoods don't recognize that what's a poor white kid a poor black kid and a poor asian kid got in common poor they're all poor so i'm not discounting the importance of ethnicity and gender and all those nationality but i think we've got to look at not only what o ddyniaeth a'r genedlaeth a'r holl dyniaethau hynny. Ond rwy'n credu bod rhaid i ni edrych ar nid unig beth sy'n ein gwneud i ni wahanol, sy'n bwysig iawn mewn sefydliad fel ein gilydd, mae cyd-diffid yn bwysig, ond hefyd beth sydd gennym ni'n gyffredinol, cyd-diffid. Felly rwy'n rhoi sgwrs yn Birmingham, rwy'n mynd i lawer o ysgolion, ac rwy'n ei enw'n ymwneud â llawer o bobl, un Birmingham.

Oherwydd os na allwn ni ddod at ei gilydd a gweithio gyda'n gilydd, sut allwn ni fynd ymlaen? Felly, gadewch i mi roi rhai enghreifftiau o eroedd o'r clas gweithgaredd. Roedd yna dyn o'r Rhymgysylltiad Chartist, rwy'n gwybod eich bod chi'n dda. Felly roedd y Rhymgysylltiad Chartist yn y rhymgysylltiad gweithgaredd mwyaf. Yn 1829, fe ffurf29, Thomas Atwood formed the Birmingham Political Union to bring together the middle and working classes to fight for democracy. And huge meetings were held across... When you say democracy there, do you mean political democracy?

Is it... OK. So at that time, basically, we were dominated by the lords and the... OK. Wow, in 1820? No, in 1830. So are you saying there that these people didn't have a vote? There was a place called Old Sarum, and it was just a hill. It had, in the Middle Ages, been a little settlement. And the owner of that hill sent an MP to Parliament.

It was a place called East Dulwich, which was off the coast of East Anglia. This hill owner, did he represent then who? Yeah, he decided who would represent him. Who were these people? Is he their lord, or does he own a factory? No, this was in the countryside, so he'd be the lord of the manor. Is he posh? Like, is he royal? No, they wouldn't be royal. They'd be landed...

You'd either have the landed elite, which would be like the great lords and ladies, and then you have the gentry, which are the knights of the shires. There's a place called East Dulwich, which was sunk under the North Sea. The lord who owned the land, the coast opposite East Dulwich, appointed an MP to parliament. the coast opposite East Ullage, appointed an MP to Parliament. So those were called rotten boroughs. Then there were pocket boroughs where there were only a few electors. There was one or two places like Nottingham, Coventry, where a few freemen had the vote.

But basically... What's a freeman? So a freeman would be, if you belonged to an old-fashioned guild, in Coventry it would have been like the silk weavers, Coventry Blue, the beautiful collar. And a guild is a bit like a union. Yeah, it would have been of really highly skilled men. Byddai Coventry yn ysgolwyr sylfaen, coventry blw, y llyfr gwych. A'r gild yw'n ychydig fel union?

Ie, byddai'n ysgolwyr sylfaen iawn. Ac eto, mae'n ddyn iawn. Felly roedd yna'r cymheithiwr gwych yna, Thomas Atwood, o Hale's Owen, aeth i'r ysgol yn Wolverhampton. Roedd yn d of a West Midlands man. He started the Birmingham Political Union. A quarter of a million people met in Birmingham on May the 8th in 1832 to call for peace, law and order and the extension of the vote. And what happened was the government was so concerned over this that eventually the King had to threaten the House of lords he would he would create loads more lords so that the bill for the reform act would go through the reform act went through and what in effect happened was the middle class had said to the working class back us up let us get the vote first

and once we're in parliament we'll get the vote for you so what happened they closed the door they got sucked in to the political nation so then what happened was in 1838 the chartist movement six points to the charter universal male suffrage do you know what ladies what they wanted originally they wanted universal suffrage but it was so radical to think that working class men could have the vote they dropped the idea of women having the vote but there were there was lots of female chartists so they took the name from the charter universal male suffrage payments of mps now today we look at that and think why should we have payments of mps if you're a working class person and you want

to go to parliament how are you going to do that if you're not working class person and you want to go to Parliament, how are you going to do that if you're not going to get paid? It's alright for the rich, they still get their money. So that was really important. Getting there back then was probably way more expensive. Very, very much. You had to stay in a tavern, you had a horse, you know. Correct. All that. They wanted equal electoral districts, regular Parliaments. Most of the things that we would say today were part of British democracy the chart is fought for

So they had huge was there ever any violence to put them down. Yeah, there was there was Lots of violence used so with the greatest leaders the art chart is movement were Irish It does sound like quite Irish activity There was a man called Bronteer O'Brien and physical... Bronteer? Bronteer O'Brien. I'm sorry, Bronteer O'Brien.

Wow. Is that a nickname? No, that was his real name. Wow. Okay. I thought you were going to tell me what it meant. No, I've never even

heard of that. And there was another man called Fergus O'Connor. Okay. There was a guy who was originally, we think, from the West Indies

called William Coffey. Felly roedd ymdrech hwn yn rhywbeth nid oedd yn ymwneud â'r clas gweithredol Cymru, ond yn y clas gweithredol sy'n byw yng Nghymru. Fe wnaeth ymdrech, roedd yna lawer, roedd yna fwy, roedd yna fwy There were more army soldiers in the north of England than had been sent to India because they were so worried about what was happening. There were lots of meetings. Eventually, the Chartist movement slowly disintegrated. Civil war is the fear there, obviously, or just a peasant uprising? Well, it wasn't even so much as now,

because Thomas Hardy was the great writer of the last of what we could call the English peasantry. And when I'm using the term peasantry, I don't mean it in a derogatory sense. I want to say it in the real sense, which means landed people, workers of the land. Is that what it means? Yes, that's what it really means. Paisano would be the Spanish equivalence. Paisan in France. So a lot of these words, you know, go across Europe.

So Thomas Hardy and the Mayor of Casterbridge, the trumpet major and other novels, he really captured the end of the English peasantry. That's why his books are so inspiring and so important. And when you say the end, does that mean they ended up working in factories? Lots of them ended up working in factories, but lots were pushed off the land

because just like what happened in the Highland Clearances when the Lairds got rid of the crofters because they wanted to have sheep instead of people, people have pushed off the land so what we see with the charge economic reasons get off the land because we want the resources there of sheep or cattle and this had started at the end of queen elizabeth the first round with the enclosures so the common land was was continually being enclosed and the what does that? Because someone asked me to ask you that. Right, so the common land is you would have your three fields

in the three field system, right? And there would be strips. And different, you know, depending on how many strips you owned, you would farm those strips. You'd have one big field, a huge field that was fallow, and the next year,

the other field would be fallow. But you'd also have common land. And this was reallyow and the next year the other field would be fallow but you'd also have common land and this was really important for the rural poor because they might be able to raise a pig on that common land everybody's in common how do people not fight over this they they try to but what you what you need to understand is the power was with the gentry so this is not the often it's not the great lords the dukes and that it's the knights it's the lords of the manors it is a great lords as well but the ones in the at the forefront would be the the gentry and so they get an enclosure act passed is there a bit of police in there like if not so much two peasants are fighting over yeah my pig

wants that and your pig can go fuck itself. Who comes in and says, hold on, lads, we've got to eat equal stuff for the pigs here. If it got too bad, there would be the militia. So the militia, basically, in those days, it would be equivalent to what we now call the terrestrials. But where the terrestrials should be classless, the militia was very much gentry, and those attached to the gentry that relied upon them and they were often cavalry so for example have you seen uh ken loach's film peterloo yeah i recommend it to anybody that hasn't seen it because this was 1819 after the napoleon it was again before the chartist movement there was this great outpouring of desire for democracy and uh oedd ymdrech hir i'r ddynion ymdrech, roedd yna'r ddynion hir hwnnw o dymograffiaeth.

Ac os ydych chi eisiau darllen cyfrifiad cyntaf, un o'r... wel, yn sicr y peth gorau, yw gan ddyn Samuel Bamford, a ysgrifennodd amdano. Ac roedd yn cael ei sefydlu yng Nghymru, ac fe gysylltiedigodd nhw am reformaeth. Cyfarfodd cyffredinol yn Sain Peter's Fields yng Nghymru. Ac fe ddodd y milisïaeth i'w hynny ac yn eu hynny, yn gwrth-dynion, gyda chyffrediniaid. at St Peter's Fields in Manchester. And the militia came and attacked them on horseback with cutlasses. And there was a panic. Some were killed by the cutlasses. Others were trampled to death, women and children.

In its sad generation after generation of violence across the world with women and children and men suffering. So what they did, called it peterloo because it was satirical four years before it had been the battle of waterloo this was a massacre of the english working class so you've got to understand that the class system was they had the politics they had military they had the law now what you'll Roedd yn cael eu cymryd i'r gwleidyddiaeth, y llyfrgell, y llaw. Yn fy ymchwil, byddwch chi'n gweld, wrth edrych ar y gwahaniaethau o'r 19eg ganrif, bod mhen yn cael eu cymryd i lawr am ddwy neu tri mis am ddiffidio'r bobl,

o ddynion bwcledd, o ddynion llaw, o ddynion metol. Ond byddai rhywun sy'n gwneud coini gwneud coini gwneud yn cael ei gynnal am ddwy neu tri mis. with metal and yet somebody that uttered false coins made false coins would be sent down for five years and there's a distinction that was there in English law sadly was property was more important than the poor who were suffering from the gangs so when we look at the English working class it's a battle that's been going on for centuries. And it's a battle that unfortunately, over the last generation has declined in terms of the attention it receives. Because I'm guessing, right, just again, why would they teach that in schools here like in the same way that if you go to school here you're not going to learn about well here's a bunch of shit we did to the irish

here's a bunch of shit we did to the to the indians like similarly it doesn't benefit the powers that be to go here's a bunch of shit we did to your grandfather yeah yeah you know what i mean the the difficulty as well is, funny enough, coming here... How do you feel? Is this new information that you're hearing here?

One man over there quite proudly says no. But in general, is this shit taught in school here? No. Not some schools, but not many. There are occasional schools.

I think a gentleman up there said, are you a teacher, sir? Yeah, so you teach at your school? No, that's the point. Fair play to you. Yeah. So it's really hard, it's very hard to teach these subjects because the national curriculum is a straitjacket

that is squeezing the life out of creativity in schools. And youngsters have to learn at the age of six, seven and eight about Romans. Well, let's start with Nan and Grandad. We're ancient history, aren't we? Start with Nan and Grandad, and then you can take them back as far as you want then, because they realise people are people throughout history. And that's the fun of fucking history.

Of course it is. When people... If I get asked, why do you love history so much, I say, it feels like time-travelling empathy. Yeah. It is because what we need to understand, one of the things I think we need to, again, tie into what we've just been talking about, we need to know more about who we are and

our own localities so that we can reach out to the world. Why are people here in Birmingham and Coventry and places, Manchester and everywhere else, from the Caribbean, from Ireland? It's because we went out there and people have come in. So by understanding our local history and finding out why people live here, we can reach out to the globe. So I don't see, again,

I don't see local history as something insular. It's about opening up our eyes, finding out why, what is a place name? Why is it called such you see just it's it's it's so interesting hearing this because like so from the irish perspective right so we're very much about our history right but the general vibe in ireland and you'll see this at the moment with like the entire world is looking now and going, fucking hell, why are the Irish so vocal about Palestine?

Like, even our politicians in Ireland who are Tories, effectively, are bizarrely like, it's, oh my God, am I agreeing with them about fucking, it's strange. Like, our Tory politicians are like. Well, you've got two parties there are, haven't you? Fian Gael and Fianna Fáil. Two cheeks of the same fucking arse. Yeah. But it's interesting there that the politicians that have policies

that have loads of homeless people and hackless policies, they're actually going, no, no, no, no, there's human rights abuses and this needs to be stopped. Now, not as much as they should, because they were going to expel the ambassador today and it didn't happen. So people were disappointed with that. But the thing is with Ireland,

how we often feel about our history is oh god that's a lot of pain there for a long time yeah what's the point of that if we can't use that for empathy yeah do you know what I mean rather than going um into into bitterness or sadness you go well look at we're doing okay now and that was a horrible thing that happened to our ancestors but this gives us a real unique we're doing okay now. And that was a horrible thing that happened to our ancestors. But this gives us a real unique... We're white people who were fucking colonised. So we were colonised as white people

and we have a voice then as white people with that privilege to go stop it over there. And that's what we try and do. I'll tell you a great example of that in Ireland. Have you been to Strokes Town? I know, but I know about it. In Roscommon. Anybody from Roscommon who got family from Roscommon?

Roscommon, it's a small county just to the west of the Shannon. And you cross over the Shannon at Athlone and the Westmeath part of Athlone is quite big and bustling. As soon as you hit the Roscommon part, it's small and quiet, isn't it? And people tend to just drive through roscommon to get to

well there's westport in galway and there's galway city but roscommon is a really historical place the oldest family in europe live there wow the o'connors of roscommon they are the descendants of the last high kings phelan o'Connor and the others of Ireland. You mean so older than, like, fucking British royalty older? Our king can take his ancestry back to Nile of the Nine Hostages of Ulster. They can go back just before that. Wow. Father to son.

And then Strokes Town has got this huge square, but it's also got a family museum, which was one of the most upsetting things I'd been to in my life. But coming back to the point you made, what they did in the museum, because the people around there, the Mahons were the owners, the landowners. They had been Catholic, but they were adventurers,

and they joined in with the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy. And they had a lot of land, and they sent a lot of people on the coffin ships from Strokes Town. And Denis Mahon got shot by one of his tenants. But in the museum, it wasn't just about the Irish who'd suffered. It was about Ethiopia. It was about contemporary famines, which were happening.

I'm going back now 25 years since I was there. But it was a moving and disturbing, but an important experience. And that's the shit, Carl, that we're scared of losing. Yeah like shanae o'connor she was that for us yeah yeah fucking shanae ripping up the posts at the post picture even something as simple as going on to the grammys and public enemy who were a rap act yeah yeah they weren't they didn't have an award for them or something.

It was racism. And Sinead went up and sang and shaved Public Enemy into the side of her head. Sinead, in 1987, when, again, the most important music in the world was African-American hip-hop, it was not being taken seriously by record companies. So Sinead, as a white artist, who was one of the big...

Like Britney Spears at the time, that level of big. Yeah, yeah. She demanded that, no, no, no, I'm going to have a female rapper on my album and her name is going to be there

beside mine. And she nearly fucked up her career over it, but she's like, I don't fucking care, I'm Irish. And similarly, Bernadette Devlin,

you know Bernadette Devlin. Yeah, yeah. Bernadette Devlin from Derry in the north of Ireland who I had on this podcast. She was invited to New York by the Irish-Americans. Yeah. And the Irish-Americans were going, oh, isn't it terrible what's happening over in Ireland with the British? And then Bernadette says,

you're doing that here to black people. And she took the key to New York City and instead of accepting it, went up to Harlem and gave it to the fucking Black Panthers. And the Irish Americans fucking hate her. And she says, I don't give a fuck because I know what my roots are. And we're very proud of that and we don't want to lose it. But the sad thing is as well, what you've hit on there, and I've met lots of Irish Americans,

a lot of them are racist. I know, yeah. And that's sad is that people who have faced racism their descendants then become racist and they got their

there's a brilliant book called How the Irish Became White yeah by Nord Ignatius was his name and he basically uses history

to show that when the Irish arrived in the 1840s in New York they wouldn't have been considered white in the way that today like Romany people you know New York, they wouldn't have been considered white in the way that today, like Romany people,

you know what I mean? They wouldn't be considered white even though it's not necessarily about skin colour, it's about a structure. And Irish people became the white Irish Americans they are today through acts of brutality against their African American neighbours. Well, they massacred

them in New York during the Civil War. But you see that around the world. Like, man, I got into a taxi in Limerick and my driver was... He was a dude from Nigeria who'd been in Ireland a while. And as soon as I got into the taxi, the first thing he wanted to do was complain about Ukrainians. But it made me feel sad.

I know. Because that was his way of assimilating yeah and you see that the world over who's coming in behind us great that makes me a little bit more in the system now and there's a sadness to it you know but that reaction is not conscious with the most people no it's an unconscious thing that happens so what you need to be brought out more into the opening. We're not talking about these things in the opening. No. Well, we are tonight,

but a lot of people don't talk about it. And you don't hear politicians talking about it. Except insulting people. I'm trying to see what our interval is now. Another ten minutes. I'm trying to figure out what question can I ask you, Carl, that will last 10 minutes long.

Can I tell you why it's interesting for me to come here this evening? Go on, please. Well, I was on the dole in 1986. I was just finishing off my doctoral thesis, and there was a... I think he's still here, Professor James Hinton, a historian, and he was going on study leave, and my tutor was a wonderful tutor called Dorothy Thompson.

She had written a lot about Chartist women, and her husband, Edward Thompson, wrote The Making of the English Working Class, which was the first book that really started. I have that book. I haven't read it. It's brilliant. You've got to read it. It's very deep, deep-toed. it's very much based on west yorkshire and adult men who were skilled or semi-skilled but it was the oh it was the gate opening to social history and he contacted james

hinson contacted dorothy thompson and said to her could you recommend somebody and this was my first job here part-time I was on the dole and they allowed me I think I picked up 25 pound for a session and they let me keep a fiver of it the dole office did but she was a wonderful influence on me because coming from a working class background, I didn't grow up poor, I grew up well off. Dad was a bookie. But my mum and dad were very working class culturally. So mum was Aston, dad was Sparkbrook. I worked in the betting shops from when I was a kid. I grew up culturally working class and proud to be from there and to know how fortunate I was to have an education.

My nan left school virtually illegally at 12 to mind the babbies. She was the oldest daughter of 12. My dad left school at 13. Our mum, 15, went to work in a factory. So I was very lucky. And when I started university, I was the first one of the families who had gone past 16, well, 16 at school.

And I was doing my doctorate. I was married to Kay, my Dublin wife. And we got two babbies. And I used to my doctorate, I was married to Kay, my Dublin wife, and we got two babbies. And I used to go into the seminars, one-to-one classes with Mrs Thompson. And after about three months, I said to me, Carl, would you call me Mrs Thompson? I was 26 at that stage, two kids, married. She said, will you call me Dorothy from now on? I said, of course I will, Mrs Thompson.

Because that's how I'd been brought up. And it took me years to overcome that. And I still, I think I've still got that. And is that a class thing? Yeah. That's looking up. Yeah, and not only a class thing, it is a class thing,

not necessarily looking up, but not being confident in who we are i'm sure there's many of you in here feel the same as me you know that not having a chance to speak the middle class people when you're going up yeah and not so much even that because you didn't see them but it's the public school kids i saw it i saw it at university when i was teaching the youngsters from private and public schools were so confident compared to the kids from Roedd y myfyrwyr o ysgolau cyhoeddus a phobl cyhoeddus yn hyderus iawn yn ogystal â'r plant o'r cyhoeddus a beth fyddai wedi bod yn fach. Ac mae hynny'n golygu gweld cyfle, a chael cyfle. Ie, ie.

Pwy bynnag faint o fach yw hynny. Felly, mae gennych chi'r teimlad hwnnw, na fyddai hynny'n dda. Felly, mae gennych chi'r teimlad hwnnw, na fyddai hynny'n dda. Felly, mae gennych chi'r teimlad hwnnw, na fyddai hynny'n dda. Felly, mae gennych chi'r teimlad hwnnw, na fyddai hynny'n dda. Felly, mae gennych chi'r teimlad hwnnw, na fyddai hynny'n dda. Felly, mae gennych chi'r teimlad hwnnw, na fyddai hynny'n dda. Felly, mae gennych chi'r teimlad hwnnw, na fyddai hynny'n dda.

Felly, mae gennych chi'r teimlad hwnnw, na fyddai hynny'n dda. Felly, mae gennych chi'r teimlad hwnnw, na fyddai hynny'n dda. Felly, mae gennych chi'r teimlad hwnnw, na fyddai hynny'n dda. Felly, mae gennych chi'r teimlad hwnnw, na fyddai hyn should I have been there? I shouldn't have done something. Do you know what I mean? That you're not, you still haven't got that self-confidence. You come over a self-confidence, something you have to develop, but there's still that inside that,

yes, yeah, yeah, thank you. Yeah. And then that confidence then can be called aggression. Yes, you're right, because I remember when I first started. I wasn't going to go to university because I'd worked in the betting shops from when I was a kid. And we'd had a couple of arm robberies and the old man was determined I was going to go to.

I'd had a gun at my head twice. And I went to university and I wasn't going to go. So I put down Manchester, Sheffield, York and somewhere else. And I didn't put down Birmingham. And anybody that knows, my wife Kay's in here and she says, she's come from Dublin to live in Birmingham. She says, Carl and his family moving a one and a half mile radius from where his great, great, great grandfather lived in the 1820s.

So I ended up, I got accepted at Manchester and I got decent grades at my A levels and I won't go in and on the Sunday as I should have gone our nan turned up finger missing from a power press accident my uncle George turned up emphysema could hardly walk tall

because he'd got problems from working at a scrap yard my uncle, one of these are my great uncles turned up, he was a polisher he had to walk, do you remember the old fashioned nebulisers o weithio yn y llyfrgell. Roedd fy mab a'r mab fwyaf wedi dod i mewn. Roedd yn ddynol. Roedd yn rhaid i mi ffordd. Yn cofio'r nebuliaethau oedd yn ddynol? Roedd yn gallu cofio oherwydd y pot. Roedd y metel ar ei chest.

Ac fe wnaethon nhw ddynnu i mi, rydym wedi gweithio ein holl bywydau i rywun yn y dyfodol gael cyfle. O, mab. Felly, es i i Manchester ar ddiwrnod. Ac roedd y ffila yn chwarae ar ddiwrnod. Ac fe wnes i fyfarfod fy mab a'r llawr yn y gwarchod, a'n mam a'n dad ar ôl. Yn ymlaen, fe wnes i ddweud, beth ydych chi'n ei wneud?

Fe wnes i ddim gallu ysgrifennu, roeddwn i wedi bod yno drwy ddau diwrnod. Ac roedd yn ystod, beth oedd hi, diwrnodau ysgol Tom Brown. Roedden ni'n rhaid i ni ddynnu bwrdd a chyfn yn yr Aelod y Gwlad. like, what was it, Tom Brown's school days. We had to wear a mortarboard and a cape in this hall of residence. What? Yeah. And we had to sit at these long tables and I can't handle this. How long a day were you wearing a mortarboard?

No, it was only just to get to dinner. Okay, yeah. What's the point of that? I don't know. So, I gave it another week and I come home and luckily the tutor got in touch with Birmingham University and arranged an interview and I got in there and that's the only reason I stayed and got into university. If not I'd have been a bookie.

Do you think so Doug? You've such a curiosity, Carl. Would you have just been a curious bookie? Well, I was always... I love... People say to me, where do you get your love of history from? And it was Mum and Dad and Nan and Grandad and aunts and uncles meeting at our mum's on a Sunday

and having a tot and then talking about the old end. And the old end was still there when I was a kid. Yn Ynni, ac yn cael ychydig o ddodd, ac yna siarad am yr oedd y llaw. Ac roedd yr oedd y llaw yno hyd yn oed pan oeddwn i'n blant. Ynni oedd yn byw yn y cyd-drech yn Aston, ac wedyn fe wnaeth hi symud i'r Masonet yn Nechals, a oedd wedi cael ei ddodd yn y pen draw. Roedd teulu'r dad yn well i mi oherwydd roedden ni'n bwci, ond roedden ni'n gweithio yn y siopau bethau ar y Rhywbryd Ladypool ac roedd pobl yn dod i mewn ac yn gwybod fy mab-barnedwyr. Felly roeddwn i'n gwrando ar storïau the lady parole and there were people that used to come in and knew me great grandparents and so i was listening to stories about working class life for me from when i was a babby and for me the the biggest thing that i could do would be the worst sorry the worst thing i could ever do

would be to betray him and i hope i've never betrayed them because I'm the lucky one I grew up better off and I had an education and my duty is to give something back not just to my mum and dad but to all those poor working class people who had nothing in their lives but fought and scratched every day to make a better world and with God's grace one day we will get that better world when we can smash that door of privilege and open it up for all our kids I'm going to let you have a pint and a piss and we'll be back out in about 15

minutes Wonderful opportunity here for a little ocarina pause. I'm going to fix this microphone. A little ocarina pause here. That was some crack. That was some night I was having there in Coventry. The fucking audience loved it. But let's have a little ocarina pause

now. I'm in my hotel room in Oslo so I don't have my ocarina but I do have a packet of Norwegian nuts that I just pulled out of my mini fridge so I'm gonna crinkle and shake these Norwegian nuts and you're gonna hear an advert for something alright

mmm crinkly Norwegian nuts they're will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever There. and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's a girl. Witness the birth.

Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for you. No, no, don't. The First Omen. I believe the girl is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six.

It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real, it's not real. What's not real? Who said that? The First Omen. Only in theaters April 5th.

Called Polly. Original-en. Which I assume means original. Original Polly nuts. I haven't eaten them yet. They look like salted nuts. They might get eaten later on there's an anthropomorphic nut man

on the front of the packet he looks a little bit like Mr Tato who we have back in Ireland but much jollier with a strange fringe that was the Norwegian nut paws you'd have heard an advert for something there support for this podcast comes from you the listener via the Patreon page That was the Norwegian nut pause. You'd have heard an advert for something there.

Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash theblindbypodcast. This podcast is my full-time job. It's how I earn a living. It's how I pay my bills. It's how I have the space and time to fail so that I can deliver the best possible podcast to you each week so if you enjoy the work that I'm doing this brings you mirth or merriment distraction if you enjoy this work that I'm doing please consider paying me for that work all I'm looking

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Patreon.com forward slash TheBlindBuyPodcast. Couple of gigs coming up. What I want to plug is the stuff that there's tickets left for. So on the 2nd of... Wait a minute now, I can't read dates. 20th of the 2nd... No, no, now. I can't read dates. 20th of the 2nd. No no no.

On the 20th of February. 2024. I'm in Derry. I'm in Derry. Right. At the Millennium Forum. Come along to that. It's for the Northern Ireland.

Fucking science festival. That'll be good crack. Then what have I got after that? Killarney. On the 23rd of February. Down in the eye neck in Killarney. Wonderful Killarney. And then I suppose the big one after that.

My UK tour. I have a big giant tour. Of England, Scotland and Wales. In April. That I really want you to come along to. Em. I'm doing fucking fucking Newcastle, Glasgow, Glasgow sold out, Nottingham, Wales in the Millennium Centre in Cardiff, Brighton, fucking Cambridge, Bristol, I think Bristol sold out And then my biggest ever gig, biggest ever gig I've done,

which I cannot wait for. I'm in the Hammersmith Apollo in London on the 1st of May. Come along to that. I can't wait for that tour. I'm going to have wonderful guests. And the audiences are just fantastic. The magnificent Kraken Tans,

as I call my listeners over there, across the Irish Sea. Let's get back to this tremendous chat with Professor Carl Chin. Something we were chatting about backstage, and it's something that is bizarrely controversial here, is like, you were talking about how as a Brummie person, you have dialect, you have certain words

that are specific to you and these words are dying out, but they're not respected. And I said to you, what do you mean? And one example you gave me was bab, like you called me bab because I'm younger. But then you said to me, you know, this is an Anglo-Saxon word. And I was like, wow, can you speak speak about that the little dialects that you have and yeah I think one of the interesting

things that one of the problems we've got in this country is that if you get an education you're supposed to speak in a certain way and I faced a lot of prejudice in my career that even when at the BBC of a local radio station, being told I shouldn't speak as broad as I do. Why should I change? If I change my accents, I'll be betraying the people I come from.

And I'll never betray them. And I'll give you another example of a word, and I wouldn't use this word to young women or women from outside Birmingham or the black country. A byddaf yn rhoi enghraifft arall o ddyn a dydw i ddim yn defnyddio'r gair hwn i dynion ifanc neu dynion o fwydledd Birmingham neu'r wlad golyg. Ond roedd fy mab yn fawr iawn o fod yn ein gweinidog. Iawn? Nawr, mae'n ddiddordeb i'r fawr iawn yma, y gair weinidog. Nid yn y gwlad golyg, nid yn y gwlad golyg, nid yn y gweinriau, nid yn y ffordd o Dŷn. Fy mab oedd eich hwyl fawr. Roedd fy mab yn y ddau oedol o 12, nid oedd wedi cael

blant, roedd e'n dda. Roedd hi bob amser yn meddwl am y babi, oherwydd roedd fy mab mawr wedi mynd i weithio yn y 1920au, roedd hi'n trapus yn y strydau yn chwilio am gwaith. Roedd fy mab mawr yn 12, roedd hi'n gwylio, roedd hi'n gwylio yn y llythro, i'r fwyaf. Ac mae'n anodd, mae'r fwyaf yn dweud wrthym ein bod ni'n mynd i'r llythyr i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n mynd i'r llythyr. Roeddwn i'n gweithio mewn canteen ar y Cyfrif Cyrff Hercules yng Nghymru, yn Aston, Rhondda. Felly, nid oeddwn i'n cofio'r babi. Roedd hi'n fawr iawn i fod yn ein wench. Ac ar y diwrnod cyntaf, roeddwn i ar y radio, ar BBCWM, ac fe wnes i ddweud i'r gynhyrch Brwm i fyny, roedd yn cael ei ddweud,

Beth amdani yw fy wench? A fe wnes i cael ei alw gan y rheolwyr ar ddiwrnod And I got called in by the management on the Monday. You shouldn't be using that word. I said, now listen, I'm only using it in this specific circumstance with an older woman. And they were, we don't want you to use it again. The next week, the first person on was an old woman who says, oh Carl, I do love it when you call us old uns wenches. You know when you feel like saying, put that in your pipe and smoke it. So there's words like that. So these are words that to me, they're my mum and dad,

they're my nan and granddad, they're my forebears. They're words that Shakespeare would have used. And Shakespeare was one of us. Now... He was rap music. Yes, he was the people's poet. He grew up not only in Stratford, but in North Warwickshire in Polesworth. He spent a lot of time in Polesworth. And there's a lot of people from landed backgrounds, landed aristocracies,

who say, how come somebody from Stratford could write plays to this quality it wasn't him it was an Earl it was a Lord or whatever well they're wrong because he uses Warwickshire dialect words that anybody outside Warwickshire... Well there is storytelling tradition as well that's what I'd like to know about yes we know all about our storytelling tradition in Ireland and I want to know like even you know Guy Ritchie the director yeah Guy Ritchie said that he learned to make films by listening to working class storytelling

tradition in a pub when he was a kid I think there's two things there there's the oral tradition which is passed on like the shunaki yeah from the west of Ireland the storytellers uh the griots of Nigeria our oral stories in Ireland can go back maybe 10,000, 15,000 years. And you even see the words, like there's even theories about, there's words and stories in Ireland that relate to floods.

And some people reckon that it's people who saw the Ice Age. Yeah, yeah. And we still have that true words and stories because when you don't have fucking writing and you can't write down a map you keep these stories going so that you have mountains and lakes and whatever

and it's not just a lake, it's a lake with a magical fish so you never fucking forget it, you know what I mean? I think what happened here was the industrialisation and the mass movements of people to the towns and cities, the industrial towns and cities, there was a disconnection then with the countryside. They brought in as much of the country with them as they could.

They raised pigs and chickens in the poorest areas. And they brought their words with them. And that, to me, is why those dialect words are so important. So there's... Words from the countryside. Yes, words from the countryside that come in. Ac mae hynny'n ddiddordeb i mi. Felly mae... Fy nghymau o'r gwledydd... Ie, mae'r cwmni o'r gwledydd yn dod. Felly, nid yw fy mhrofiad wedi dweud, Gwneud ymlaen i'r Ruspens.

Gwneud ymlaen i'r Miskins. Mae Miskins yn y gwaith Cymraeg Cymraeg yn ymgysylltu â'r gwaith Gwreiddiol. Roedd yn cael ei gyflwyno i'r cwmni o'r Gwarchod North Warwickshire. Roedd yn cael ei gyflwyno i'r Cwmni o'r Cwrthgyn. Yn ymlaen i'r Gwyrfodau Gwarchod, ymlaen i'r... Brought in to North Warwickshire word. Brought in to Birmingham, into the back-to-back courtyards. In The Merry Wives of... Is it The Merry... No, it was one of his other plays. And he's got this bloke that they're having at a barney.

I was sitting at the Royal Shakespeare Company because our Richard was doing drama and we went there. And I was like you said, I was struggling a little bit. And suddenly, these two blokes were having a barney and one of them come out with a list of vile insults and he said, your breath is as foul as anything I've ever smelt from the soft. And I thought, I'm a sitting here amongst all these people, I bet I'm the only bloke that knows what the word soft means.

It's the old word for drain in Birmingham Birmingham but it was a North Warwickshire word so there's lots of these words sadly they're drying out they were brought in from the countryside blarting you go over the wreck that was the one I was saying earlier and a big kid will eat you

and you come back to your mum and you go what's the matter with you big kid's hit me now mum go back and fight him I can't fight him mom he's too big go back and fight him or i will give you something to blart about and you were more scared of your mom belting you than you was of the big kid blarting is the middle english word from the north north warwickshire for the bleating of sheep what does the bleating of a sheep sound like? A babby crying. And these words are poetical and they're historical and they connect us to our

origins in the countryside, but they're dying out. I have a little question for you and I need to know if this, again, it's something I heard, so I'm going to try and take it back maybe 800 years around then, right? Okay. What I heard is that okay so the normans took over here yeah the anglo-saxons so the normans were spoke something that'd be similarish to french and i heard that about 800 years ago 700 years ago posh people spoke something frenchish and then poor people spoke anglo-saxon and then if i'm eating my dinner today it's beef on the plate which is buff which is french but it's a cow in the field which is

anglo-saxon it's poultry on the plate which is poulet which is french and then it's chicken in the field which is yeah saxon so what you have there even on our own fucking dinner plates you're looking after the animal. You're caring for it, but I'm eating it. Yeah. Is that legit? Is that real?

Yeah. The Normans spoke Norman French. It'd be very difficult unless you knew Anglo-Saxon to understand a full Anglo-Saxon, what an Anglo-Saxon would say. Does it survive? There is Anglo-Saxon writing, isn't there? There's Anglo-Sn dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, mae'n dweud, where there is a weir, the River Avon.

Now, what's really interesting here, which is where we reach out to the world again, there are very few Old British, which will be now what we call Welsh words, Welsh place names in Warwickshire. They're overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon. But our river names are overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon. But our river names are overwhelmingly pre-Celtic. They're from the people that were here before. So the river Avon

is Abona in Welsh and the Arb is an Indo-European word for river. There are rivers in the Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, that have the same route. Who knows the forest of Arden?

Yeah? Henley and Arden? Where we used to get our ice creams from? Tamworth in Arden? Hampton in Arden? Arden is the name of much of North Warwickshire. There's a place called the Arden on the borders of france and

belgium isn't that it's an upland wooded area arden much of north warwickshire is an upland wooded area not a forested area but heavily wooded copses little woods farms around that again is a pre-celtic night word so one of the things I think that we should start to do is start to look at our origins and understand who we are and how we have all come together. My own city, Birmingham, is named after an immigrant. Nobody teaches our kids this.

Bayorame ingas ham. The ham, the home. How do Scottish people say home? Ham. The home of the Ingas, the people of Bayorame. It was a German. Wow. It was from a Germanic tribe, the Angles.

If you look at the map of Jutland Peninsula, on the borders of Denmark and Skleswig-Holstein, there's a small peninsula called Angolan. The Angles gave their name to? Angoland. England. They came across the North Sea as the Roman empire was collapsing.

They settled in great numbers in the land of the East Angols. And some of them started to move westwards, the Middle Angols. And then Baorma came with his people,bl hyn, ym mhobl, yn dechrau cwmennu â'r Cymreigion lleol. Mae rhai ohonyn nhw'n ffyrdd y tu ôl, y Warriors, a byddai'n cael eu diwydiannu, ond mae'r rhan fwyaf o'r bobl yn dweud hynny.

Felly, yn Birmingham, pan dwi'n rhoi sgwrsau yn ysgolion, yn Saltly a'n Alan Rock, sy'n brwmwyr Cymreigion, ystod genedlaethu, Brwmwyr Cymreigion Cymreig, Mae gen i dnaeth Anglosaxon o ddeunydd, mae gen i dnaeth o ddynion, mae gen i dnaeth o ddynion, mae gen i dnaeth o ddynion, ond mae gen i dnaeth o ddynion,

ond mae gen i dnaeth o ddynion, ond mae gen i dnaeth o ddynion, ond mae gen i dnaeth o ddynion, ond mae gen i dnaeth o ddynion, ond mae gen i dnaeth o ddynion, ond mae gen i dnaeth o ddynion, ond mae gen i dnaeth o ddynion, about who we are and where we come from, to understand what we have in common. I heard that when the Anglo-Saxons, when they came to Britain, and they were from the forest of Germany, that when they went to places like London, which was like big pillars built by the Romans, that they thought that London was built by giants, so they stayed away.

Yeah. We can't ever prove that. And the idea that they all came from forests is a wrong one. Or the idea maybe that they never saw Romans. Yeah, yeah. Because where you see the Jutland Peninsula, it's flat. That's why the Angles had to leave. The sea was coming in.

Go away. It wasn't wooded. They were climate refugees. Yes, I guess. They came over en masse. The Saxons didn't. So the Saxons tended to settle in the south. Essex, East Saxons. Wessex, West Saxons.

But then others moved away from where the old Saxons lived by the Angles and moved to what is now Saxony in East Germany. So there's a connection there. But the Angles and moved to what is now Saxony in East Germany. So there's a connection there. But the Angles weren't from a wooded area. They were from a flatlands where the sea was encroaching. And they moved to East Anglia.

And their leader was a man called Itchel. And the kings of Mercia, who arose at the time of the... Anybody seen the Staffordshire Ode? If you haven't seen it, it's an amazing collection of gold that was found in Hammerwich, just outside, just to the north of Birmingham. Hammerwich interested the settlement of the Hammers, smiths, making things.

And they found this amazing collection of broken gold, booty from a battle. And it was at the time when Mercia, the Midlands kingdom, was emerging. And it meant the marches, the borderland. And their leader was Pender, who was the last probably great pagan king. And the Angles were coming further west.

When you say pagan, who were the pagans then? Were they here before the Romans? No, who were the pagans then? Were they here before the Romans? No, we were the pagans. Do you know where the word pagan comes from? Go on. Latin, Pagani,

country dwellers. Is that what it means? Because the country dwellers stayed loyal to the old gods longer than the Kivitas, the people in the cities. And do you know anything about Anglo-Saxon religion?

Yeah. Or beliefs? Yeah, so, we've got two places, well, several places that are named the cities and do you know anything about uh anglo-saxon religion yeah or beliefs yeah so we've got two places where several places that are named after anglo-saxon beliefs one is which is coventry see your thoughts i forgot it's not is it coven and witches no co cofers tree or cofers tree so if you look look at Anglo-Saxon mythology, there's a god called Baldur. And Baldur was hung on a tree like Jesus. Am I right?

Go away, really? Yeah, yeah. And Baldur was hung on a tree. We think that Kofa, we don't know who he was, probably would have been somebody of importance or religious figure.

And there would have been a holy tree here. In Birmingham, there's a place called Wheely been a holy tree here in birmingham there's a place called wheelie castle now don't get excited there's no castle there it's just the ruins of a manor house but wheelie lee where you see the lee in the west midlands it's a it's a a clearing in a woody landscape and we'll we are would have been a heathen temple tisley the clearing dedicated to the god chew tuesday anglo-saxon got a war then we have two places in the black country named after wolden the great god of the anglo-saxons the equivalents of olden of the vikings right woldensberg of Odin of the Vikings, right?

Woldensburg. Wensbury. Woldensfield. Wensfield, the open space, the field of Odin. So around the Birmingham Coventry area, black country, we stayed loyal, the people stayed loyal to the old guards a bit longer. That's why they're... Because it's outsiders, people nearby that give you a place name.

You don't name it yourself. Of course. Like Ireland didn't call itself Hibernia, the Romans did. That's right. They called it there. What I'd like to know, so, is... So, when I'm hearing you speaking about, like,

old Anglo-Saxon beliefs and stuff like that, and to be honest, it's not really that long ago, you know? Now in Ireland, in 500, which is, that's Roman Britain times. Yeah, just after. Patrick came to Ireland, and when Patrick came from Wales to Ireland, he brought with him not just Christianity, but fucking Latin. Yeah. And that was hugely important for the Irish because in 500, we had thousands and thousands of years of our mythology, oral.

And then what the monks in Ireland did, because Rome didn't have much say over us, we had this Christianity and we're like, fuck it, let's mix it in with some of the old stories. But because of that, we have written in Latin thousands and thousands of year old stories about Fionn MacCool, about the salmon of knowledge, all of this stuff. And the fiend. And the fiend, yes. Cú Chulainn. And Cú Chulainn. I mean, even that, it's like, who's Cú Chulainn? Why is he called Cú Chulainn?

He is the hound of Cú Chulainn. Who was Cú Chulainn, like, I mean, even that, it's like, who's Cú Chulainn? Why is he called Cú Chulainn? He is the hound of Cú Chulainn. Who was Cú Chulainn? Well, he used, this kid was called Setanta. Yeah. And he wanted to be trained by this warrior called Cú Chulainn. But Cú Chulainn had a dog. Cú is dog in Irish. Cú Chulainn had a dog who was fierce.

And when Setanta wanted to meet this master, the dog attacked him. So Setanta got a fucking Harley, a game that we still play, and he hit the Harley in the ball and it lodged in the dog's throat. But the dog died. And now Satanta is there going, fuck, after killing this cunt's dog,

and I want him to train me. And then Cullen comes out and says, you killed my fucking dog with your Harley, you prick. And then Satanta says, I'll be your dog. And then he became Cullin, the Hound of Cullin. And so then there's the Bullicoolie. Yes, of course, the brown Bullicool.

So Ulster used to expand officially into Monaghan, Louth and Cavern, as well as Donegal. And they had a great bull. And Queen Maeve of Connacht wanted the bull, didn't she? She went to all her people over to nick the bull. And there's a wonderful trail from Carlingford, which is on the east coast of Ireland,

across through the Midlands, to Queen Maeve's burial. Yeah, in Sligo. In Sligo. But if you look at that story, which is pre-writing, effectively you've got a fucking map. It's a map. And what this is, just to go on a tangent, it's what I

fucking love about James Joyce. It's where you can rebuild Dublin from Ulysses. It's that tradition. It's the Irish tradition of, you can't take it away from us. We will plot out a fucking area with interesting stories, and it's a map if you want it to be. But we had the benefit, like I'm saying, of in the 500s, we got Latin from the Romans, and then we were able to,

our monks were like, I'm going to write about Christ, but I'm going to put Cú Chulainn beside it. That's what got us fucking invaded. My book is called Topography of Hibernica. And the reason it's called Topography of Hibernica is because when the Normans invaded us, after the Normans invaded ye in 1066, they were like, right, how do we properly colonise the Irish? The Pope at the time was Adrian, he was English.

So what... The only at the time was Adrian. He was English. So what... The only English Pope ever. Yeah. What Gerald of Wales did, the normal chronicler, he went and did topographia of Ireland, this big map of Ireland. And what he was really trying to prove was,

look at what they've done to the Bible. Because we've had 500 years of writing, like the story... And of Celtic Christianity. Yes, a new Christianity that, yes, Jesus is there. Like even the fucking shamrock,

which is our Holy Cross, you can trace that back 3,000 fucking years ago. You go to, longer than that, you go to Newgrange, which is older than the pyramids, and we have it in Ireland. You look at the designs on that and it's a fucking shamrock so do you know what I mean that's old old thousands of years old

Christianity but when Gerald was coming to Ireland going let's colonize the fuckers it's like look at what they've done to the bible these are savages and then he went and told the Pope Adrian and it's like go on Christianize him, give him democracy. You know what I mean? But the other thing I heard is the Irish, when Rome collapsed in Britain, and the Anglo-Saxons didn't really have writing as such today. No, they had runes.

But the Irish reintroduced Latin and writing and gospels to the English. Yeah, particularly in the north of England. So there was saints like St. Columba and others that came down. And Scotland as well, the part of Ireland back then too, there was Dalrieta. But the south then, they said, yeah, Dalrieta would have been, what is now County Antrim and Argyllshire. So the Scots, again, that's a Latin name,

and all it means is pirates. They weren't really pirates, they were a people. Oh, the Scottish as well, doesn't that mean like Irish people that come over here? Didn't the Picts call them that? Yeah, the Scots, it was a Latin word for pirate. Okay, yeah. The Picts were mainly,

they were the indigenous Celtic tribes of what is now Scotland, Alba before that, and very much their stronghold would be what we now see, Aberdeenshire, Fiveshire, areas like that. And it wasn't until Kenneth MacAlpine married the last daughter of the great Pictish kings, and the succession went through the female line, that the Scots from Dalreda brought the Gaelic language and took over Pitland

and started what becomes the Kingdom of Scotland. Something, can you hear Carl all right? Could you bring the mic a tiny bit closer for the laugh? I know, it's a flippin' hard job doing this. I mean, I'm having to negotiate. I'm thinking I'm going to come the right pearl or fall over in a minute. We had this chat for fucking 11 hours

while getting rat-arsed and bitten by mosquitoes. Tell them what happened to you afterwards. What happened to me afterwards? Were you back to the hotel? Man, I was shit-faced. I didn't know what happened to me afterwards. What did I do afterwards? You went on the internet, didn't you?

Oh, God. No, I got... I'm going to grass him up now.. You know, I got... I'm going to grass him up now. No, man, I got drunk and started posting drunk videos in my hotel room in my underwear to 270,000 people. Harmless stuff, like, but, you know, you wake up the next morning and it's like, that many people didn't need to see your jocks, man. I didn't even know. I was just going, here's my hotel room, guys. And there's a fucking mirror, man.

Not even good underpants either, like Primark underpants. And then you made it... It made me look like I had a very shabby cock. And then you made an appeal for something, did you? Oh, Jesus, I went looking... This cunt. No, I went looking for fucking hash at 4 in the morning in Birmingham. But again, I asked 270,000 people. So every single person woke up their local drug dealer.

And then I woke up the next morning. I wasn't involved. I like to say that. That's all. On my own. But I had a lot of phone numbers and all this in the morning, just going, do you want the hash or not? And I'm like, no, no, I don't know.

It's 10 a.m. now. I'm trying to see if they'll let me into the fucking breakfast bucket. But that was... We literally got off stage, kept talking, and I think what happened was because me and you were talking so much and having so much crack, the organizers were like, don't get involved. We were talking about whether Churchill was good or bad. So they're like, don't get involved, leave him alone.

And they just kept putting pints in front of us. And I don't think we knew whether when our pint ended and finished. I felt like I just ranked one pint, but it turned out it was 25. but I don't go to the toilet. What I want to ask you about is, we were speaking backstage about surnames, and you said that the Normans introduced hereditary surnames. Yeah. So, if the name fits, it's French. Fee, son.

Yeah. So, you think of Fitzgerald, Fitzpatrick, if they're really Irish names, and he said they're from Normans. Yeah. So you've got Lord Montgomery, Field Marshal Lord Montgomery. There's a village in Normandy called Montgomery.

So the Normans came, it was, and that's where us English need to understand about loss. The English stains, what we might call the nobility of the Anglo-Saxons, sydd angen i chi ddeall am llwth. Roedd y dynion Saesneg, y nodiad o'r Anglosacrwydau, wedi cael eu llwthu. Roedd y rhai a ffwrddodd ar Hastings yn marw, neu oedd eu llythyr wedi cael eu llwthu.

Roedd rhai ohonyn nhw wedi mynd i Constantinopel a ddod yn awdurdodion Varengi ar gyfer yr argraff Byzantin. Yna roedd yna roedd ymrwymiadau. Roedd yr Arl yma, Lleofric, hence the Leofric Hotel. And he rose up with his brother Morcar, the Earl of Northumbria. They lost.

And so by the time of the Doomsday Book... And the Doomsday Book was... So the Normans, the French come over yeah and they're like we colonized how do we write down everything how many pigs how many people how many this and that that for me as well is that's your modern colonization very much we're going to come in here and this land here is about extraction of wealth so how and it's a very like we're talking about the ruling class today the real posh posh posh they go right back to william the conqueror so so william when they came there were so many rebellions we were recalcitrants around here so he sets up a big he put one of

his top blokes and scoff in charge of much of north warwickshire and the black country where he's down the black country south staffordshire and he built a big castle at dudley well first of all it would have been a mott and bailey so a mound with a keep a wooden keep surrounded by a fence and a ditch but then a better castle he built he went up north he harried the north it was a terrible time they massacred people left right and center they destroyed the crops he was showing his searching himself and we need as english people i think to understand that we were like we lost king harold had done an amazing warrior he knew knew that Harold Ardrada was coming over from Scandinavia with a huge fleet.

And he knew William was coming over as well. And he heard that Harold came and he said to Leofric and Morcar, don't take him on because you'll lose. And they lost. But he got up there and at a great battle they destroyed the Vikings but as they were leaving the word came from the south that William had landed now what William did was very clever but horrible he pillaged raped and murdered

in Harold's own earldom now that in those days if you were a lord your duty was to protect to protect your own here he had to get back and he told leah fricker more car follow me bring your men and i will meet him and it was it's really interesting reading the accounts not in anglo-saxon because because I can't read Anglo-Saxon, but the translated accounts. The night before the Battle of Hastings, or Sandlach, as the Anglo-Saxons called it, the Anglo-Saxons got caloid.

For those that don't know, that means they got lagging. And they were singing and drinking, and the Normans were all, well... And he nearly won. Harold nearly won. When what they called the Third, which was the ordinary blokesans were all, well, and he nearly won. Harold nearly won. When what they called the Third, which was the ordinary blokes that were asked, the peasantry, to fight, they did a decoy, the dummy, and pretended to flee,

and they drew him down. And he then sent his top five or six of his top men on horseback to kill Harold. His brothers and most of his bodyguards, his houseguards were dead by then. And the arrow didn't actually kill him. But can you imagine you've got an arrow in your eye and then there's five men on horseback coming at you.

And his common law wife, as we would say nowadays, was Edith Swanneck, who was supposed to be one of the most beautiful women in England. And the next day after the battle here Edith Swanneck and Harold's mother were allowed onto the battlefield by William and they found him and when they started to take off his armor he'd been hacked to pieces and William wouldn't allow him to be buried in a grave where it could become a symbol. So we need to understand that over the next 20 years, the English Thanes lost everything, and by 1086, there were only two Anglo-Saxon Thanes that still had land.

One was in the north of England, and the other was a man called churchill and his son was called olfwin and churchill eventually took a hereditary surname he was he was the lord of warwick for a time but the normans took that from him but he kept a lot of manners in the north warwickshire area in the forest of arden and so like the normans had brought in hereditary surnames harold would have been Harold Godwinson, the son of Godwin. Harold's sons would not have been Godwinson, they would have been son of Harold, Haroldson.

But the Normans brought in the hereditary surnames, so Churchill decided he would take a surname. And he called himself Churchill de Arden, Churchill of Arden. He is a direct ancestor of who? Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden. So Shakespeare had in his blood Anglo-Saxon, going right back. And I feel that if we could understand more as English people

that we lost, that we lost land land and our language disappeared and it became Middle English with lots of Norman French and other words. The first English king to start to use English, but only in a few commands, was Henry V. And that's a couple of hundred years afterwards, isn't it? It's 300 years after. Yeah. By 275.

That's mad. Yeah. So it took a long time. And is that like what I'm saying, why we have it on the plate today? Yeah. And because as well as that, they brought in the laws about property, because they own the land, about killing deer, that you could be killed for killing a deer, for trespassing,

things that poorer people had to do in the countryside even for rabbits and you could get done for that you could be you could you could be transported as a babby i've just i've just been doing some research on a a bloke of irish descent his dad was a school master but abandoned his mom to live in poverty in bir. It was called Jeremiah Corcoran, and he killed a police officer in 1875 in Navigation Street. For the laugh, or was it, like, feening and stuff? No, it was with a gang of English lads attacking, and from the age of nine, that poor lad had been sent down. He stole a bit of flannel linen. Yn ystod y 9 oed, roedd y fadr hwn wedi cael ei anfon. Roedd yn gynnal ychydig o fflynol.

Roedd yn cael ei anfon i'r pen draw yn 1865. Roedd yn cael ei anfon i'r pen draw i'r pen draw am 21 diwrnod gyda'r gwaith anodd. Allwch chi ddychmygu beth oedd yn rhyfeddol? Dydw i ddim yn ystyried beth oedd yn ei wneud yn ystod y 9 oed. Roedd yn rhyfeddol i un oedolion yn y pen draw, but what a terrifying experience for a nine-year-old kid to be in a prison with men, many of whom were violent, having to break stones, pick oak, old rope. You're talking about trauma. Trauma.

And trauma responses. And then, do you know what happens to him? After he's done his 21 days, he has to do five years in a reformatory, which was brutal with beatings. Now, that lad, his mum was, even in the newspapers at the time, they said she was a good woman, she'd done her best,

she'd been abandoned by her husband. But that lad, unfortunately, was born, raised into a life of crime, not by his mother, but by the environment and by the system that brutalised him. And why don't we learn those lessons? We're still doing it, aren't we?

We're still doing it. I know you're talking about something from the late 1800s, but you'll find that story today. Just something to go back to. When we were speaking about the Normans and William the Conqueror being a very specific type of prick. Let's be honest. But a very specific type of prick.

And in Ireland, we're not too fond of royalty, as you can guess. But in Ireland, what we say about royalty is, especially over here, we go, oh, you're royal, is it? What does that mean? Well, my great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather was profoundly violent, and because of that, I started to do a funny dance and wear this hat across several generations, and now that's why that's mine.

And that's royalty, but it is! And one of my, one of my favorite things to do when I just find, I love doing it. I just pick a fucking random member of the royal family, right? Random. And I like all their parents have blue ticks on Wikipedia. So if someone's royal, you can click on parent on Wikipedia, like, and you can go click, click, click, click. And I like to click and click and click toipedia like and you can go click click click click and i like to click and click and click to see how far i can go and after about a half an hour of any english royal i end up

with like some i end up with some uh some viking called olaf olaf the tongue eater you know what I mean? Because even the English royals, the Normans, were effectively Vikings that had left their land and did some bad shit in France. You know what I mean? And then became Normans. Rollo. Rollo.

Mad bastard. He went off. Now, it's interesting what you said about the Normans in Ireland earlier on. Well, the Normans in Ireland actually became quite kind. No, they became Irish. They became more Irish than the Irish. But they started to dress like us. They started to have our intermarriage, our customs, our music.

Do you know why they became more Irish than the Irish? Because we're great fucking crack. No. They married Irish women. Oh, yeah. That's to be my Irish wife, Kay, over there somewhere. But, yeah, the initial colonisation of Ireland, like it was brutal at the start, but it's... I'll give you another example of the Norman connection with us over here.

Go on. You go to Galway, alright, there's lots of shops spelt Birmingham with an E. Wow. There are Birmingham's, in fact my wife's cousin is married to one. Oh the name, Wow. There are Birminghams. In fact, my wife's cousin... Oh, the name. I know loads of Birminghams. But you...

Okay, yeah. They're from Birmingham. They were Normans. Right, okay. So... They also gave us hedgehogs. Yeah, yeah. The Normans used to eat hedgehogs.

Take the prickles out first, though. What? Take the prickles out first. Oh, yeah, take them out. I don't know why they used to love eating hedgehogs. What's interesting about hedgehogs is, because I've spoken to biodiversity experts about it, it's an example of an invasive species that just went,

I'm pretty cool here. But it's interesting because it was like the initial normals that came over. When hedgehogs came to Ireland, they didn't fuck anything up. They just went, I'll have a couple of snails. And give me a hedge and a couple of snails and I'm fine.

I'm quite happy. But in Ireland, the name hedgehog is gráin óg, which means ugly little thing. But what you see with that is the Normans come over and we're just like, who the fuck are these cunts taking?

And then they have their tiny little spiky animals and you see the kind of the vitriol in the name yes like i mean they're not i know hedgehogs are gorgeous you gotta put in a bit of effort like but if you see a little hedgehog they're cute like i'm not gonna like you know in fairness if i find a hedgehog at night time and they're coming up trying to eat some of my cat's food i'm not gonna go what an ugly little thing i'm gonna, what a cute little thing. So you can see when the Irish call them ugly, it's like because they belong to them.

Like I was talking to a biodiversity expert on today's podcast, and she was speaking about a specific type of plant, and I can't remember the name of it, but in North America, the indigenous people call it white men's footsteps. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? And you see

how certain plants and certain animals and what it means to colonisation and who's brought it there. It's an interesting point. When we were kids, we all played cowboys and what I'd say now, we used to say the term cowboys and Indians. And we'd come out the pictures,

sorry for you youngsters, the cinema, and we'd be our own horse and our own Ac fe ddododd y lluniau, diolch i chi, ymgyrchion, y sinema, ac fe fyddwn ni'n ein gwrs ein hunain a'n gwrs ein hunain, cowboy neu dyn. Felly fe fyddwch chi'n llwyddo'ch ôl, eich llythyn, gyda'r un ddyn a chyflawni gyda'ch dau ffingur. Ac yna dechreuodd rhai ffilmiau newid ein safbwynt o'r ffordd y byddai'r Wladwyr Cymru yn cael eu trafod. Roedd un gyda Jeff Chandlerler when he was Cochise, which was a powerful film, but the one that really, really made us start to think,

actually, something terrible happened to these people. And I don't know if anybody remembers it, Soldier Blue. If you've never seen it, have you ever seen it? I think it was Candice Bergen was in it,

and it was about the massacre at Wounded Knee. Oh yeah. And the massacre at Wounded Knee that whenever America speaks about terrorist attacks they always forget about the massacre at Wounded Knee. And there was a I think it was Sioux

Sioux people but it was nearly all women, children and old men in a hollow. And the American troops just massacred them. And then I read a book. That was like, was it like 1900? 1879, 18, something about then. And then there was a book by a man called Dee Brown.

And he wrote about Wounded Knee. about he took that and he took it back and he brought it forward and if you look at it today at Native American people on I mean look at the word reservations it's their land of high alcoholic rates mm-hmm a high male suicide, people who've got no... Everything has been took from them. Intergenerational drama. Yeah, yeah. Try and see that. I don't know if it's still available, Soldier Blue,

but I remember seeing this. I was only about 16 or 17, and me and our kid and a few mates went... We didn't come out, you know, shooting and slapping our thighs it was it really really affected us uh i think again d brown's book is if you've never read it it's called bury my heart at wounded knee and it is an expose of what really happened um i deliberately haven't asked you about peakaky Blinders tonight.

Well, I wanted to give you... The thing is, whenever you get asked to speak, it's about Peaky Blinders, and I wanted to give you the opportunity to speak about all the other stuff you're interested in. But could you tell us a little bit about the real Peaky Blinders? LAUGHTER Well, the series is pulsating, it's compelling, charismatic actors, modern soundtrack which you wouldn't have expected.

I've got to be honest here now, Kay's here, my wife, she'll tell you, never watch a historical series with a historian that writes about that period. After the first five minutes of episode one, series one, I stormed out. I said, where are you going? I said, are you going to stop moaning? I said, all I've heard for five minutes, we don't speak like that, that never happened, that's not right. It's a drama, and it's really to bear in mind that gangsterism, it's a great drama,

but it's glamorised gangsterism. And gangsters are not glamorous. They're vile. And the real Peaky Blinders were backstreet thugs who baited the police. What do you mean baited the police? Like ball-baiting, they liked to bait the police, beat them. Three police officers were bricked to death.

One was murdered by Jeremiah Corkery. The predecessors of the Peaky Blinders were called Sluggers. They battled each other with bricks, stones. Their main weapon, it's a myth about the razor blades in the peak of the cap. I heard that growing up, but it's a myth. First of all, disposable safety razor blades were not patented by King Gillette until 1904. They weren't sold by great numbers until 1907 in England, by which time the

Peaky Blinder gangs had gone. Number two, they were poor men. A set of five best disposable safety razor blades of Sheffield Steel cost 37 shillings and sixpence. For those who don't understand old money, that was nearly two nicker. A poor man would be lucky to earn 90 pence. Number three, you've got a flat cap. It's soft. So I'm going to have

a boss stuck with you around and I'm going to take my cap off, right? What have I done to my body? I've opened it up, haven't I? I asked somebody to belt me. And then I take it off and it flops. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my cap off and go, just wait a minute, mate, I'm just going to fold it up

so I can slash you. So it's not feasible. And number four, most importantly, the original Peaky Blinders did not wear flat caps. And I've proved this with photographs from the West Midlands Police Museum, from the old Birmingham City Police, Nid oedd y gwylion pecyn o'r ddechrau yn gwneud yn ysgafn. Rwyf wedi'u ddangos gyda ffotograffiau o'r Amgueddfa Gweithredol Cymru, o'r Gweithredol y Cymru, a hefyd o ddynion o weithwyr polis, a rhai dynion anodd o bobl o'r amser. Roedden nhw'n gwneud hynny, cofnod o'r cyffur, a oedd yn bôl o'r hat.

Roedden nhw'n cael ymdriniaeth o'r haes, oherwydd maen nhw'n hoffi dangos i'w ffrindiau, lle roedd y troedion o'r polis wedi'u llwyddo'n ddifrifol iawn. Roedden nhw'n hoffi dangos i'w ffrindiau ble byddai'r tronjwyr a'r polis wedi'u llwyddo, neu'r bwclau o'r bel. Roedd eu llawr ar gyfer y bwclau o'r bel. Felly, roedden nhw'n cymryd y bwclau, roeddent yn rhaid i gael brae, os na fyddai'r troesau wedi llwyddo. Ac roedden nhw'n gosod y bwclau yno.

Ac yna roedden nhw'n cwblhau'r bwclau o'r palwch o'r dde, ac yna roedden nhw'n bwclau tua 8 oed sydd wedi'i gadael, ac yna byddant yn llwyddo. Roedd yna ddifrifion pwysig. Ac roedd yna'r coffi, roedd ganddyn nhw'r goffi'n ddifrif iawn, ond roedd llawer ohonyn nhw'n hoffi gwifio. Roedd ganddyn nhw'n gwifio'n hir. Ac eto, mae gen i ffotograffau o hyn i ddangos y realiti o'r menywodau a chyflawni'r cyfnodion. Felly, beth fyddant yn ei wneud gyda'r hat, roedd yn cael ei enw'n coffi, byddant yn llwyddo'r brin, prove the reality of the memoirs that I found and the contemporary statements. So what they would do with the bowler hat, it was called a billycock, they would wet the brim, hold it over the fire and make it like a funnel. And when they put it on, they would wear it jointly to one side of the head to show off the peak, the quith.

Hence the peak blinded the eye. They not only baited the police and battled each other viciously, they bullied the hard-working, decent poor amongst whom they lived. And I think this is really important to get these points across. They were not heroes. They were wife abusers. They were petty thieves, many of them. They'd go in a pub and order a round and wouldn't pay, and if the public had asked for money, they'd smash the pub up. Roedd nhw'n ddynion pech, y rhan fawr ohonyn nhw.

Roeddent yn mynd i'r pob a'u gwasgaru ac yn gwneud amser. Ac os oedd y cyhoedd yn gofyn am arian, roeddent yn gwneud amser. Roeddent ddim yn gyfrifolion sef y craeidd a'r rhai eraill. Roedden nhw'n dynion ystod y stryd. Un ohonyn nhw oedd fy mab, Edward Derrick, a oedd yn abuser yn y gwaith. Pan oeddwn yn ymchwil ar y stryd, roedd pobl hwylau ar y stryd fy mab who was a wife abuser. When I was researching my dad's street, older people on my dad's street said he used to come home mucky drunk

and that my great-grandmother would run with my grandmother, Maisie, into the Brewers, the shared communal wash house, or else next door to Granny Carey, because he wouldn't go into Granny Carey's house because they'd got five sons. But if she didn't get out in time, he would beat her brutally. He'd smash the house up. He was a thief.

On one occasion, he had several occasions he assaulted the police. And on one occasion, he was in a fight with a bloke, hit him with a shovel. That never worked. So I don't know why it was there, but there was a meat cleaver and he cleaved the man's head. The man lived and he only got three years. And he came from a line of violent men

and abusive men. So these, it's really important for me when I'm going to schools, there's always a group of lads in tough areas that are... Do you know this weekend, do you know the fascist marches in London this weekend? All of them had the fucking, the flat cap.

Yeah. There was a lot of flat caps there and I knew that these are fascist, hateful people marching today, Tommy Robinson's people, and they're trying to look like Tommy Shelby. And what the fuck is going on there? So there is a danger there. Who's identifying with that as a type of Englishness and why?

So that to me is a real danger and that, so whilst not acknowledging the power of the drama, it is a drama. And mafia-style godfathers like Tommy Shelby are not respectful to old people, do not treat women well, and are not kind to children.

They screw their own. Would you look at them today? I mean, find me the nice ones today. They're all pricks. Well, you look around. Last week, a large number, a lot of men in Belgium and elsewhere, Italy, were arrested for belonging to the Andragata. I've probably mispronounced that.

This is the Calabrian. Oh, they're the lads, the Calabrian, yeah. The Calabrian mafia now control, they've come from the mountains, they control the cocaine trade in Europe. You've got the camorra in naples you've got the mafia obviously in sicily and they've got tentacles everywhere the albanian mafia control the importation of cocaine into britain do you know about the connection between the mafia and remember all the somalian pirates that we saw yeah so if you look at that coast

there what is it called between italy and africa the horn of africa horn of africa so a lot of somalian people there for years and years were fishermen yeah right yeah but the mafia for years and years and years in italy were doing uh rubbish scams the Mafia would take over the rubbish trucks but then they wouldn't dump it ethically. They'd dump it in the sea. And years and years and years of the Mafia dumping in the sea around Italy killed the fucking fish in the Horn of Africa

and then the people from Somalia were like, there's no more fish. What do we do? And then piracy came from that. Yeah. And if you look at Naples, there's huge mountains of rotting rubbish outside Naples. So,

gangsterism is not something that is to be admired. They are not anti-heroes. So, enjoy the drama. Enjoy Sopranos. But it's only Soprano

he's not to be admired. Have you watched Sopranos? Yeah, yeah. They do a good job of showing that he's not to be admired. Yeah. I think they do. What do you think Sopranos? Yeah, yeah. They do a good job of showing that he's not to be admired. Yeah. I think they do.

What do you think? I think they do it but they're also quite compassionate with it because they show his trauma and wounds and what you get a sense with Tony Soprano

which I loved is there's actually a good man in here waiting to break out but his circumstances, his life, what he saw around him, no way. and inside him

is this nice person and he cannot show that so I think the equivalence of the Peaky Blinder Backstreet Gangs today would be the Postcode Gangs you know where kids in London and Birmingham

and elsewhere are killing each other for coming from the wrong district but I think then drugs has added to that because they're not only

Backstreet gangs fighting each other for territory and toxic masculinity but they're also fighting each other for control of earning something from selling drugs and then i think that's the trauma of poverty yeah so and i think we've got to be aware here that it would be a calumny to Felly, a dwi'n credu ein bod ni'n mynd i fod yn ymwybodol y byddai'n fath o ddyniaeth dweud bod rhywun yn fach yn mynd i fod yn gwybodol. Mae'r rhan fawr o bobl fach yn gweithio'n anodd, yn rhyfeddol, yn ymdrech i gyd i gael allan o'r pobrydrwydd wedi'i gyflawni gan system anodd. Ond nid yw'n siŵr bod cysylltiad â'r pobrydrwydd a rhai o'r doubt there is a connection with poverty and some of the crimes that we're talking about am i the wonderful woman linda wan who is from a working class background in dublin now she's a

senator in ireland and she's someone she speaks out quite frequently but when lynn speaks out yeah it is seen as aggressive and it's like no no this is where I'm from and this is how we speak out. But she speaks quite well about that, about the poverty and how the pressures of it. But what you've said there, again, is another problem with gender bias, isn't it? If a man speaks strongly, he's speaking strongly. A woman speaks strongly, oh, I was being aggressive.

You know, a woman's talk is gossip, isn't it? But men, men discuss. Men fucking gossip, isn't it? But men, men discuss. Men fucking gossip, man. Do you ever speak to a fucking taxi driver, man? Oh my God, taxi drivers. There's a great book by a historian called Melanie Tebbett who's reclaimed the word gossip and

she's written a book on women's gossip saying women's talk was vital for poor in Port-au-Rez because a woman might say, there's a shop down the road they've got a sale on for this, that, Mae hi wedi ysgrifennu llyfr am ymgyrchion i ddynion, ac mae'n dweud bod sgwrs i dynion yn bwysig ar Pôr Nôr. Efallai y byddai rhywun yn dweud, Mae yna siop o dan y rôl, mae ganddyn nhw'n gorfod gwneud stôl ar gyfer hyn ac hyn, ac yr un. Neu, mae'r dyn yn edrych am gwaith, mae fy mab yn mynd i'r plin. Yn y bôn, mae'r dyn yn cael ychydig yn ymdrin, gadewch i ni fynd i'w helpu. Felly, mae hyn yn llyfr gwych gan Melanie.

Mae'r rhwydwaith ysgrifennu i gadw i'r dynion yn ddiogel. Yn ymwne this is again another problem, talking of gangs in Finglas, where my wife comes from, there's a gang leader who's very powerful, and in the newspaper he's called Mr Flashy. Yeah. Mr Flashy. Oh, that's the Irish fucking newspapers, man.

I don't know what they're doing. The Irish newspapers give the gangsters names and follow them around like they're fucking Diana Ross. Yeah. Like, it's bizarre. It's a very unique Irish problem.

The monk. The monk. How could he be a flippant monk when he's a... I think it's because he was quiet. I think that's why. I'm going to end the chat there because there were audience questions after that, but I don't want the podcast to go on for too long.

That was a tremendously enjoyable night that I had there in Coventry with Professor Carl Chain. Like I said, go out and buy his books. Hopefully he's going to be doing his own podcast at some point, so I'll probably have him back on for that. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. I'm going to be back next week most likely with a hot take when I'm back in Ireland back in my studio but right now I'm going to fuck off into Oslo, experience the cold and get ready for my gig later on tonight and also tomorrow I'm hoping to use a flotation tank I've never been in a flotation tank before like sensory deprivation so I'm going to do that tomorrow because the the company that brought me over to do these gigs in Oslo is actually a flotation company they the name of

the business is floating Oslo if you're ever around Oslo and you want to use a flotation tank, get onto Floating Oslo. And Carl there will sort you out. He's a sound man from Glasgow. Alright, dog bless. I'll catch you next week. In the meantime, rub a swan and genuflect to a worm.

Kiss a cat. I'll see you next week. Saturday, April 13th when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. Thank you.